14 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Blog
How would you like to get eyeballs, keystrokes, raves and referrals on and about your blog at the same time? Here are the top 14 ways of getting these:
1. Your content has to be current as well as timeless. It must be published as breaking news (well, almost) and written in a way that it is eminently readable even after a year or so.
2. Your writing style must have a dash of humor, wit, sarcasm and spoof-ery to it. Blog visitors are impatient folks – give them formal language and they’ll press the X button on your top right.
3. Your blogs have to be informative and of use to the average Joe. If you are an expert in a subject, share your knowledge.
4. Blog posts must be of reasonable length – overstretch them and folks will drive past them. 500 words is a reasonable length, unless your blog is doling out educative stuff or talking about a technical subject.
5. You have to write about topics of interest – if you write about how your cat fought with your pet ostrich or how your kids would love to vote, then your blog will soon turn into a tombstone. However, if your kids are like Calvin or Dennis, then go ahead and even devote a blog to them. The point here is that your blog has to make for interesting reading. Use lists if you can.
6. Tag your posts after conducting keyword research. You can check the free keyword research tools provided by Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture.
7. Post pictures and videos (if applicable) on your blog. A text-only blog looks far too boring to read, even though the content may be the best in the world.
8. Build in whacked-out, crazy, mad, provocative polls that tickle the readers’ imagination.
9. Do not respond aggressively to people who leave comments. You may alienate a whole lot of visitors in the bargain. Reply to comments (if they deserve a reply)/mails and be witty by all means, but never offensive.
10. Create a page that has very useful links to helpful sites and nifty, free downloads. This will make visitors recommend your website to all their friends.
11. Ask your visitors to tag your blog/post if they like what they see. Use del.icio.us, digg, furl, technorati and reddit.
12. Do not include a whole lot of links in your text as it puts off visitors who may figure you’re trying all tricks in the book to make money rather than providing content.
13. Its cool to incorporate slang and new jargon – in fact, you can invent some words or phrases yourself. But it’s uncool to be grammatically wrong – so copy-edit your posts before hoisting them.
14. Finally, your blog’s design must be sleek and savvy. If you cannot create one yourself, hire a freelancer for a few bucks and make him develop a cool template.
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Some good tips here indeed, Alvin. Avoid the ‘oh,m poor me, no one reads my blog, xxx is such a lucky guy’. People don’t care to read those “moans”, and besides, Mr. Lucky xxx was once writing to an audience of one (himself) also. Blogging, a smuch as anyhting I have ever found, is very much a case of “just do it” and keep doing it.
Nice post:) Thanks for the wonderful tips! Most of them are really helpful for people who want to bring more traffic to their blog.
Hi Alvin, I’m still learning blogging hehe and lost 100% of my traffic after my page rank dropped. This is very good tips for me
Tank’s
Very good tips Alvin. This kind of advice can apply to a lot more than just blogs. Even regular static websites can improve traffic with these tips.
later,
-Rick
http://www.jsyob.ws/blog
Hi Alvin,
these are some good advices. How about some advices more in depth on how to go about using digg, reddit etc in details?
Looking forward to it and thanks for the above, will test it out!
Houston
Cute, you just described your own blog Alvin
I especially love your 13 new ‘hoisting’ jargon
I am looking for the Yahoo overture so downloaded “all your freebees”:
-”how to start your own traffic virus” didn’t show me any pages though, is that a prob on my side only?
And I have a feeling now I fell in your automated free trap
Really helpful article
I just try to put minimum one image on every post of my blog. Image on post could make a blog post more attractive.
Hi Alvin,
Hope you are having a nice break in Taipei.
I’ve just started a blog so these tips will be very useful to me.
Thanks!
Alvin, your post should read something like…”14 ways to make your blog attractive to your visitors”.
Nice tips. I’m certainly going to use tip #2. Keep my writing style non-formal.
Gagan
If you are using digg to promote your stuff, you might want to consider using a more targeted social news site. For example, in making money online there is http://www.carnivalofmakingmoneyonline.com – you get less traffic, yes, but it is easier to get to the front page and the traffic you get is likely to be more highly targeted and thus have a higher chance of being interested in reading/buying.
A great feature of the carnival is that they offer up to 75% revenue share on articles that you submit, and 10% share on articles submitted by your referrals, so in addition to traffic and SEO friendly links you can make some money.
Alvin, just a thought.
You could link your free templates to link point 14.
Stay strong, keep fighting
Eric Chua
http://www.maynaschua.com
Twitter
http://twitter.com/maynaschua